I think you are misunderstanding my situation. I am limited to ~200MB per 24h or my connection will be grounded to a near halt.(This limit is not just on my miners and includes normal data consumption)

Then I guess it would be nice to know how much the miners are using versus your other internet use?How many MB do the miners use in a day for how many video cards/PCs?

And you must realize that you are in a very unique situation and cutting down bandwidth was not the goal of diff 2 shares.

Each miner uses about ~36MB per day.

I know my I'm in a very unique situation. I'm not whining, complaining, or otherwise pitifully begging, I'm just asking if eleuthria ever plans on implementing difficulty 2 or >2 shares.

I think you are misunderstanding my situation. I am limited to ~200MB per 24h or my connection will be grounded to a near halt.(This limit is not just on my miners and includes normal data consumption)

I'm sorry, but at this time I do not plan on returning to the plan of implementing diff=2 shares. The downstream bandwith would be basically the same on your end, only the upstream would be reduced. I can't imagine what kind of terrible ISP you have that has bandwith caps at 6 GB/month, unless you're mining on a cell phone plan?

In other news, the EU (DE) cluster just doubled in size. I'm moving US West miners to that server at this time, in an attempt to save on costs while improving overall pool performance.

I think you are misunderstanding my situation. I am limited to ~200MB per 24h or my connection will be grounded to a near halt.(This limit is not just on my miners and includes normal data consumption)

Then I guess it would be nice to know how much the miners are using versus your other internet use?How many MB do the miners use in a day for how many video cards/PCs?

And you must realize that you are in a very unique situation and cutting down bandwidth was not the goal of diff 2 shares.

Each miner uses about ~36MB per day.

I know my I'm in a very unique situation. I'm not whining, complaining, or otherwise pitifully begging, I'm just asking if eleuthria ever plans on implementing difficulty 2 or >2 shares.

I think you are misunderstanding my situation. I am limited to ~200MB per 24h or my connection will be grounded to a near halt.(This limit is not just on my miners and includes normal data consumption)

I'm sorry, but at this time I do not plan on returning to the plan of implementing diff=2 shares. The downstream bandwith would be basically the same on your end, only the upstream would be reduced. I can't imagine what kind of terrible ISP you have that has bandwith caps at 6 GB/month, unless you're mining on a cell phone plan?

In other news, the EU (DE) cluster just doubled in size. I'm moving US West miners to that server at this time, in an attempt to save on costs while improving overall pool performance.

P.S. It's not a cell phone plan I'm just in a place where it's really hard to get a decent internet connection.

P.P.S. Do you know if it is possible to set up my miners to run through a central computer to your pool or if that would even decrease MB consumption?

I guess I would use a mining proxy and put all the miners under one username...I would not run the bitcoin client 24 hours a day.If you are really savvy you could also try shaping your connection to only allow a very slow speed withlow latency that would cap them.. but always allow communication to go through. No more bursting...

P.P.S. Do you know if it is possible to set up my miners to run through a central computer to your pool or if that would even decrease MB consumption?

I guess I would use a mining proxy and put all the miners under one username...I would not run the bitcoin client 24 hours a day.If you are really savvy you could also try shaping your connection to only allow a very slow speed withlow latency that would cap them.. but always allow communication to go through. No more bursting...

Neither of these will help.

Increasing the difficulty of a share is the only thing that will help. You can also check on Luke-Jr, he is working on some changes to the mining protocol, but I don't think it will help much in this situation.

Finding a cheap colo or a better internet connection seems like the best answer. Or, and I hate to even suggest it, but maybe mining isn't ever going to be practical where he is.

P.P.S. Do you know if it is possible to set up my miners to run through a central computer to your pool or if that would even decrease MB consumption?

I guess I would use a mining proxy and put all the miners under one username...I would not run the bitcoin client 24 hours a day.If you are really savvy you could also try shaping your connection to only allow a very slow speed withlow latency that would cap them.. but always allow communication to go through. No more bursting...

Neither of these will help.

Increasing the difficulty of a share is the only thing that will help. You can also check on Luke-Jr, he is working on some changes to the mining protocol, but I don't think it will help much in this situation.

Finding a cheap colo or a better internet connection seems like the best answer. Or, and I hate to even suggest it, but maybe mining isn't ever going to be practical where he is.

thanks for posting that. i was just throwing out suggestions.. but it appears they were not very useful at all.

Perhaps you could setup a compressed link. A proxy at your end doing compression and a vps server on the net decompressing and relaying to the pool. I have a server that's very underutilized and could help if you wanted to test.

I have no idea if the bitcoin data would compress well or not. That would be the first step - determine if the protocol data compresses well. You may be able to cut down it's size significantly or not at all, depending on the data.

This could be as simple as an ssh tunnel which has gzip compression enabled - though I wonder how much overhead that would add.

On Linux this would be simple to test. On Windows you could use the well known Putty client to open a proxy tunnel easily too.

I think you are misunderstanding my situation. I am limited to ~200MB per 24h or my connection will be grounded to a near halt.(This limit is not just on my miners and includes normal data consumption)

By very simple optimization, you cut bandwidth to 2.5% of original size. Without any binary fiddling and proprietary stuff. How many % will be the savings between Json over TCP and binary over TCP?[/list]

AFAIK, most pools are still using HTTP method. So you're looking at about 17.3MB per worker, per 24 hours.

Possibly using some sort of compression-enabled tunnel *might* be able to shave some bandwidth, but I wouldn't expect anything more than 30% savings.

US West has been taken offline. The website will also be relocating this weekend. The new EU (DE) cluster has been expanded more as well to keep everything running smoothly.

For those connecting with direct IP or like me, have to create a custom route, use IP: 78.46.184.206

For the time being, I would recommend anybody that -must- connect by a specific IP to use: 78.46.186.26. I will put up another server later on that is specifically for people with special circumstances.

Thanks for clearing that up, I will direct my miner when I get access to it later today. The IP you get when you ping btcguild.com is not the same your miners are talking to, but a load balancer. My workstation at work has dual interfaces, and the preferred gateway wont let bitcoin traffic through, so I have to route it over the guest wifi.

Yes, there was a brief idle for about 4 minutes just now. I'm preparing to relocate the website to the new cluster instead of being hosted at the old US West server. The move will happen tomorrow at noon (PDT), I'm just getting some parts moved over in advance to speed up the transition. I was not expecting the pools to lag as much as they did, so I am sorry that I was not able to give warnings about the short downtime.

When the server move happens tomorrow, stats and payouts will not be available for approximately one hour. The pools will still be online, running, and recording shares, but the website will not be calculating rounds until the move is complete. Again, this won't happen until TOMORROW. Everything will be functioning normally throughout the day, and I don't expect any more idle/pool server downtime as part of the transition.

UPDATE: One more burst of idles. I didn't catch the load balancers marking the internal servers offline due to the previous downtime, it was causing cascading failure between the nodes randomly. Quickly restarting the servers and load balancers, shouldn't take more than a few minutes.